Fascinating Statistics for Social Media Usage in 2012

Like we’ve encountered in previous years, Social Media Statistics continue to grow at an enormous pace for both business and personal users.  So far in 2012 we’ve seen a gigantic shift in the way consumers relate to both print advterising and television ads.   Now more than ever business’s are taking serious notice as to the vast reach and penetration that social media sites purvey in this day and age.  Consumers have also become thoroughly entrenched with the integration of social sites in their daily lives.

For the first part of 2012, here’s some incredible statistics that we’re seeing due to the growing popularity of social media site:

• Over 70% of television viewers fast forward through commercials with DVR devices
• Less than 20% of standard TV advertising blitzes sees any sort of positive income from their investment
• Daily, weekly and monthly print publications continue to suffer with the loss of subscribers
• Traditional over the air radio advertising survey statistics show that over 70% of listeners use some type of online or satellite radio service
• Online digital news sources such as Google, reach over 8 times the amount of readers compared to regular news publications

Now that we see where the traditional advertising mediums stand, let’s take an in depth look at 2012 social media statistics -

1.  Over two thirds of Twitter Tweeps update their online status on a weekly basis.  Just a few short years ago, less than half of Twitter’s membership posted regular status updates.  Most users were just content to kick back and take everything in.  Today these sames Tweeps are becoming more engaged with fellow users.

2.  8 out of 10 people on earth use Facebook in some capacity.  Facebook’s members spend an average of over 11 million hours per month on the site.  220 million Facebook fans access the site via a mobile device of some sort.

3.  YouTube has grown exponentially in 2012.  As of June 2012, the site has over 550 million members and generates over 110 billion video views per month.

4.  More than 4 million business web pages have integrated Facebook social sharing buttons into their sites.

5.  If Facebook were a country it would be the third largest in the world behind India and China

6.   The photo sharing site Flickr contains more than 6.5 billion images and continues to see a 30% growth rate, month to month.

7.   Over 33% of companies have Youtube, Blogger, and internet message board accounts which are used frequently.  While 65% of them have Facebook business pages.

8.  17 million reference articles are on Wikipedia’s website.

9.  In 2012, Twitter adds more than 3,450,000 members per week, and over 14 million per month.

In looking at the above statistics, we can deduce that social media in 2012 and online marketing is the ultimate medium for business and personal promotion. It’s become so big in fact Google now runs a yearly online marketing challenge which can be found here: Google Online Marketing Challenge
By looking at these staggering social media statistics for 2012, we can see that there continues to be a major shift in the way the world receives information on news, products, and services.   Gone are the days of just maintaining a simple hosted website.  Today in 2012 and beyond, we must continue integrate and focus on social media in order to maintain a competitive edge over our rivals.

Here’s a neat infographic that was originally posted here.

Social Media Techniques for effective social media marketing

Social media techniques for effective social media marketing has become a very effective marketing solution for 2012.  Social media is easily accessible to just about anybody with a computer or Internet connection.  What social media is does is basically it increases communication between customers, business’, students and non-profit organizations.  Social media is currently playing a major role in giving  large corporations and their customers an outlet to communicate with each other through.

Social Media Techniques for Social Media Marketing

From consumers having an outlet to communicate with a large corporations and institutions through, social media is currently serving as an easy way for companies to stay in contact with its customers and clients, in order to more effectively market products and services.  Social Media Marketing in 2012 basically allows major corporations to advertise more and pay less by taking advantage of the viral word-of-mouth product promoting that social media sites are known for.   Users from around the globe are able to instantly spread content over multiple social networking platforms in mere seconds.  This form of viral advertising works out better then say a PPC (pay per click) advertising campaign.

In order for small business’ to effectively market products and services in 2012, we highly recommend at the bare minimum setting up an account on Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus and YouTube.  The more social media sites that you’re on, the better for your online advertising campaign.  Blog sites such as Weebly, WordPress and Blogspot are also very important social media web 2.0 sites.  When these sites are linked together, Google places a very high value on the content that’s listed on these sites, which in turn will provide your main website with higher credibility in the eyes of Google when you link these social media sites back to your primary website.

Not only are you gaining the added exposure of your site across these Web 2.0 properties, but you’re also able to utilize the social media marketing services that these sites provide by way of added exposure to potential clients and extended brand awareness.  Couple this with the higher ranking that you obtain in the eyes of search engines due to the amount of link juice these Web 2.0 social media sites provide, and it’s easy to see the important value that marketing on social media sites provide.

With social media sites in 2012, a lot of small businesses are also using them to develop in-depth and targeted promotional strategies by being able to follow their customers and have their customers follow them.  They can advertise all of their special products and special services such as coupons and daily deals in one central location and give their client an exclusive link to these users so that they can  basically copy links or buy the product right there on the spot.

So with all this being said, when looking the vast amount of social media marketing tactics and techniques in 2012, we really need to devote our link building and marketing efforts towards these large  Web 2.0 sites that are listed above.  Once we launch our social media marketing campaign, we can just about be guaranteed that our website will be catapulted higher up in the search engine rankings.   Follow these key social media steps, develop a plan, stick to it, and you’ll see excellent results quickly.

Google's new algorithim update shook things up today across the web

Google took another monumental step today by updating their ever changing search algorithm in order to combat over SEO optimization and blackhat webspam.  Google’s new algorithm update is called Penguin. In their blog today, Google’s Matt Cutts provided an in depth overview on these sweeping changes that are geared to bring it’s search engine users more relevant and high quality results.  In disecting the information posted in their blog today, we can gleam some excellent insight into their long term search goals.  This insight will provide us with a good SEO blueprint to use in order to bring our blog visitors the most relevant content and best overall site experience possible.

Over Optimization and Black Hat Webspam

Basically, the new Google over optimization penalty algorithm update was specifically designed to penalize websites and blogs that have been using black hat webspam SEO techniques in order to game the system and increase SERPs.  These blackhat techniques include webspam backlinking strategies, keyword stuffing and private blog network utilization.  Matt Cutts described these blackhat SEO tactics as detrimental to it’s users that are seeking relative search results quickly.  An exerpt from the announcement today: “The opposite of “white hat” SEO is something called “black hat webspam” (we say “webspam” to distinguish it from email spam). In the pursuit of higher rankings or traffic, a few sites use techniques that don’t benefit users, where the intent is to look for shortcuts or loopholes that would rank pages higher than they deserve to be to be ranked. We see all sorts of webspam techniques every day, from keyword stuffing to link schemes that attempt to propel sites higher in rankings.”   http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/04/another-step-to-reward-high-quality.html

Great Content, Usability and Faster Sites

Long term results using white hat SEO techniques should be our overall goal when designing a website.  Unique and relevant content has always been the key to providing website users a great experience.  Now more than ever, when we incorporate good relevant content, we also help our cause for gaining ground in the search engine ranking pages.  Good sites utilize diverse marketing efforts through social media and peer promotion by way of delivering their users an enjoyable experience while they’re visiting.  Some key areas to focus on right now in order to make sure that your website doesn’t get left behind are:

• Fulfill your users information demand
• Optimize your site for fast loading
• Concentrate on diverse and natural backlinking, avoid using just 2 or 3 keywords
• Increase your social media campaign in order to create a “viral” effect
• Use offline promotion and word of mouth advertising
• Optimize on site SEO and keep keyword use under 2%

Social Media Tactics for Small Businesses

Social Media Tactics for Small Businesses are extremely important in 2012. In order for small-business owners to effectively develop their social media marketing campaign they need to develop a complete and comprehensive strategy before they embark on setting up social media accounts.  What you want to look at in order to effectively market your products and develop a social media plan are several things. First, look at where your customers are and how they spend their time online.  Second, we need to look at what exactly our goals are for our social media campaign.  Are we trying to gain higher search engine rankings? or are we trying to interact with customers?
The next items that we’ll need look at once we have completed the two items above are the  technologies that we’re going to use to employ these social media marketing tactics.  Do we have enough personnel and bandwidth to devote the resources to this campaign? Is there one person in our organization that can handle all of the various social media account updates? Once we have these details taken care of we can then focus on where we’re going to the start our social media marketing campaign.  A couple great sites to start out with are Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.  Let’s start out and talk about these three sites first.  On all three sites, we need a first look at creating a custom landing page that reflects on our own brand logo, colors and website scheme.  We also need to upload all of our images, videos and multimedia presentations (PowerPoint, PDF, etc.) to these sites in order to give our customers something that they can latch onto and physically see. Once we have that done we need to engage our users by offering promotions and/or coupons.  Find out what they’re looking for and invite them to Follow on Twitter and Like on Facebook.

Now that we have our Facebook account set up and our twitter account setup, we can then focus on integrating those to our own company website by integrating a Facebook like button and Twitter follow button.  We can also embed YouTube videos on our page which will give our users a chance to watch our videos and repost them. These Social media tactics work really great for business and website owners in that it gives our customers, clients and potential clients a way to start viral marketing our products very easily.  The next effective social media tactic for our social media marketing campaign is to promote our social media sites and Youtube channel via our own internal e-mail list and snail mail flyers and post cards.  Once all this is completed, it’s a great idea to also incorporate an RSS feed from your blog or your Twitter account to your companies website.  This will give your customers immediate and up to date info on your products and services and allow them to interact more freely with you.

Once we have completed all of these steps, it’s just a matter of consistently updating these social media sites with fresh content.  Generally I like to update them on a weekly basis, or every two weeks is fine as well.
The more you update your social media site, the better feel you’ll get from your customers which will yield great success.  Good luck with your social media marketing tactics and endeavors.

Social Media Income Revenue Streams

Social Media Income Revenue Streams

are growing at an gigantic pace in 2012. With all the furious buzz surrounding social media income potential and the importance of social media sites in 2012, now is a great time to capitalize on a vast revenue channel that will last for years to come. As you probably already know, social media has an extreme importance toward search engine ranking and business development. Corporations and small business’ are flocking to social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and Youtube at an alarming rate.

Social Media Income

In 2012, we’re seeing a fast shift from traditional advertising channels that corporations and     small business’ typically used for marketing such as television ads, billboards and magazines. These corporations are switching over to social media because it’s a cheap and very effective way to interact with their customers and clients. Basically, the only cost involved with starting up a social media advertising campaign is devoting the resources such as a person to handle the posting and general account maintenance. As we can see, social media is a very cost effective and lucrative way to reach a large targeted audience and it’s only going to get bigger.
Let’s take a look at the top four best social media income channels that you can capitalize on today.

Number one- Managing social media accounts: A tremendous amount of companies today are very unfamiliar with social media marketing tactics, techniques and strategies, therefore they’re looking for experienced social media management companies or firms to outsource the managing of their social media blogs to. Managing Twitter accounts, YouTube pages and Facebook pages for corporations and business owners is great way to develop a relationship with potential future clients. Social media managers are playing an increasingly important role for these corporations in developing their online marketing strategies.

Number two- The second income stream that we can capitalize on from social media is providing custom social media account pages, and what I mean by this is basically designing custom Facebook pages, custom Twitter account pages and the list goes on. As more and more business’ migrate over to popular social media site, they need to promote their brand with their company logos and colors. Think of this like designing a website, except the content will be on Twitter and Facebook.

Number three- The third item we can look towards for a social media income stream is social media account setup for companies that don’t have the know how to do it. You’d be amazed at the amount of business owners out there that are still living in the dark ages. They don’t know where to turn to or what to do in order to start up their social media marketing campaigns. This is also another great way to interact and not only obtain long term customers for your other services in the future, but we can also provide them other ongoing services such as search engine optimization and social media training which will get into next.

Number Four- Social media training packages are becoming increasingly high in demand. Once the customers social media site is etup, their going to need specific and dedicated training to effectively promote their product or service and manage their pages. Onsite training services or virtual training classes are a perfect way give these clients the training that they’re begging for.

In conclusion, there’s a tremendous pent up demand for these four service areas and there’s a bunch of ways for us to develop great income streams from providing social media services. Social media is only growing and it’s here to stay, so now is the time to lay out your business plan and capitalize on the enormous social media income potential that you can achieve by providing these services to customers that really need it.